You have a funny definition of freedom if it means support and praise of people who back things like elimination of civil liberties, strict control of speech, elimination of equality, and convergence towards dictatorship.
You have a funny definition of freedom yourself if you think that it means developing and collecting techniques to use your personal electronics as spies for the government. Whatever Assange's relation to the Kremlin may be: on this specific issue they are fighting for your and my freedom with much more impact than any soldier ever had in the past 70 years.
Assange [...] doesn't believe in freedom, he believes in absolute rule by only those who he personally agrees with [...]
According to a 2011 interview with Forbes, Assange is some sort of libertarian. Now I tend more to what is called socialist in the US, and believe little in trickle-down economy and market shenanigans, but you are describing a fascist, which Assange has never given any reason to believe he is. On the other hand, the people who "believe in absolute rule" are also those who collect and use the hacking tricks used by the CIA. So what kind of fascist would ever disarm the brown shirts?
Norwegian with electric car here, proud owner of a Leaf since August. No problem experienced this winter, even the days when it was cold enough that if you tried to wash your car the hot water would freeze on impact and keep the dirt in place for a few days (yes I managed to do that).
The problem is not the batteries themselves (though there could be if you hit 40 degrees below zero), but that electric power is used for car heating, which in gas cars is taken from the combustion exhaust. This means that I lose some range in winter, but nothing dramatic; I have seen a drop from 175 to 150 km in estimated full range. I have not adjusted my usage pattern in any way, but older cars without heat pumps and smaller batteries (like the venerable old models of Think) had more problems.
In general, battery cars start much more easily than fuel cars in cold weather: a friend of mine has had a lot more trouble with starting her diesel this winter than me with my battery.
Rwanda's civil war was due to the racism between the Hutu and Tutsi groups, which was introduced by German colonists in a divide-and-conquer strategy.
Nigeria's ails are mostly due to immense corruption fuelled by oil companies, most of which based in the same countries that used to colonise the continent.
South Africa... apartheid, anyone?
The effect of classic and neo-colonialism on Africa is unequivocally disastrous, on a scale that makes the Holocaust look like a walk in the park.
It is an incredible feature. It is incredible that anyone is still sending SMS in 2016. It does, however, reflect Microsoft's grasp of the latest trends in mobile technology.
Your point is that Hillary Clinton charges as much as others, so she's no different. The problem is that "others" are actually a bunch of crooks, such as her husband, Trump, assorted politicians who all can be accused of corruption just as she is.
No one in their right mind pays hundreds of thousands of dollars for a speech—any speech. I am a researcher and I have been invited to give lectures in universities abroad occasionally, and the rule is that at most they cover your travel costs. Nobel laureates may get command some extra treats, like conference fee exemption, presentation placement in plenary and a nice hotel, but not big payouts; besides, in that case the speaker actually has to prepare something, not just spout some truisms and rehash some old presentation.
If someone is being paid hundreds of thousands for a 5-minute speech, the speech is only a fig leaf to cover for the transfer of money; now if you are paying that money to Malala Yousafzai, it's obvious you really want to support her work for girls' education; if you pay that money to a politician that may help your company, that's corruption, be it for a specific service or as "environmental corruption", where it is normal to regularly pay politicians to be on their good side. It is obvious that even in the absence of either written or oral agreements, both parties realise that the speaker will be in debt to the organiser. That's corruption, be it Clinton I or II, Trump or whoever else.
I suggest you Americans to eject New York from the Union so you can get rid of both candidates and start over...
It is possible to take part in EU science programs and funding like Horizon 2020 without strictly being an EU member.
Yes, but you need to be a third-world county or an associated country; source here. Essentially, you can get funding if you are outside the EU if you are:
a EU country, e.g. France;
a colony of a EU country, e.g. Greenland;
an Associated Country, which means countries in the wider sphere of influence of the EU, e.g. Norway;
a third-world country like Afghanistan.
Developed countries like US, Canada, Russia and China are excluded, and that's the set in which the UK will land after Brexit. Their only option is to join as an Associated Country, but that is more expensive than staying in as an EU member. Otherwise, they can wait until their economy tanks bad enough to join the other list.
I am coordinator for two EU projects, each with 6 partners over 5 countries, and I know the system fairly well. And I have a proposal with one UK partner in processing, damnit.
Last year I saw a presentation by the head of Technology Development of Hydro, which has aluminium electrolysis as one of their core businesses. He proposed the same thing you do, using aluminium as an energy carrier: make aluminium (primary production though, not recycling) where you have power, then transport aluminium instead of setting up expensive DC subsea cables.
Since I work in renewables and hydrogen, I asked him if this could be done for wind power; it could not, because aluminium factories require an enormous amount of steady power. If power is interrupted, not only production stops, but the electrolysis cells solidify and cannot be restarted: this is a damage that requires hundreds of millions of dollars and months of lost production to fix. For example, this happened when the Qatalum, Qatar plant went offline.
So, intermittent renewables such as solar and wind are not a good match for aluminium, because it requires constant power. Hydro power is a better match.
I always suggest that people who try to deny this watch Triumph of the Will. It helps explain how the Nazis *saw themselves*.
No, no, no. You make a propaganda movie to influence how others see you. The Triumph of the Will is how the Nazis wanted German to see them, and indeed the word "socialist" was quite popular at that time in history, which is why they hijacked it in "National Socialist".
Of course, what they did had nothing of the "socialist" part. They were heavily funded by the wealthy industrialist class (Krupp is a name among a hundred others), they were against abortion and for high child-bearing rates, were fond of guns and trained children with toy guns from an early age, stressed competition and survival of the strongest, had good relations with high clergy, including the Vatican, to the point that they helped hiding many Nazi war criminals after WW2.
Then of course there is the issue of "scientific" racism and the idea of master race, persecuting political enemies (guess what, almost all in the left side of politics), invasion of the Soviet Union, persecution of Jews (an age-old right-wing conspiracy theory used to provide the masses with an easy scapegoat).
I get what you are doing, trying to pull off the Goebbelsian Big Lie by associating the Nazis to your political opponents, no matter how historically groundless and ridiculous the association is. Maybe you believe it yourself. I would suggest you read more about the Nazis, you might end up liking them a lot.
Two paragraphs, and Goering emphasizes the SOCIALISM of Nazis nine fucking times.
So, all that persecution of socialists and communists, all that Barbarossa business, all that money the Nazis got from Krupp and the German aristocrats and industrialists, and that little issue with racial purity—that was all a charade? The No True Scotsman brought to new heights...
I hope you are trolling, because the other diagnosis is that you are so retarded you could be a Trump voter.
German Mavare is one murder victim in a particularly violent country, was not a national leader and apparently the murder was due to robbery. Venezuela is besides the only country I know of where the leaders of an opposition that organised a coup was not arrested en masse (as would be normal in any democracy) and executed (as it would be the case in the US, where treason is punishable by death).
While one murder victim is one too many, in a dictatorship the scale is very different, the violence systematic and organised. You're lucky if you don't have the experience to understand this.
Proof you are wrong, sir: Hugo Chávez won all his elections fair and square, according not just to himself but to former US president Jimmy Carter, who was quoted saying "Venezuela probably has the most excellent voting system that I have ever known".
Chávez' opposition, instead, organised riots, a coup against him, and he was so magnanimous as not to have them sentenced to death (which is undoubtedly what would be done in case anything remotely similar were to occur in the US; it's called treason).
Just because you don't like his policies, his attitude or his inept successor does not make the man a dictator. And by the way there are still elections scheduled in Venezuela, and it is likely Maduro is going to lose.
Historically speaking, that's where the real danger is.
If I understand you correctly, you are claiming that the "real danger" comes from the "socialist" left wing of politics. You curiously attached the adjective "historically", even though, in the history of democracy, not one single time has any established democracy ever been replaced by a repressive Soviet-style stalinist regime. Not. Once. Ever. The closest you get is when the USSR invaded the baltic states early in WW2, but that's more like a country-to-country invasion that would have happened no matter what the regime in Russia was.
As observed by Eric Hobsbawn in The Age of Extremes, real dangers to any established democracy have always, without exception come from the right wing of politics: fascism in Italy, nazism in Germany, Franco in Spain, Austro-fascism, Vichy France, various dictatorships in South America, the colonels' regime in Greece, Salazar in Portugal, the Shah in Persia, Suharto in Indonesia.
And the way dictatorships start is not by censoring news in a private media outlet, however despicable the practice may be; it is by instilling fear in the populace, identifying an enemy (real or imagined), and convincing the masses that they have to give up their rights and trust a heroic leader to gain security and maintain prosperity. Sounds like anyone you know?
The charge times are a factor, but mostly it's cost, cost, cost!
Batteries are economically unsustainable: Li-ion batteries (the type with high energy density that you need in any battery vehicle) cost about 500 $/kWh. You can expect it to drop somewhat through the next decades, say to 300 in 2050, but they are already being mass-produced and unless a significant, revolutionary breakthrough happens, this technology has already delivered what it can.
Hydrogen storage, instead, costs about 12 $/kWh, much cheaper (I'm talking of the only commercial technology, compressed hydrogen at 350 or 700 bar). In addition to that, you need the fuel cells to convert hydrogen to power, and they cost about 300 $/kW (not kWh, kW). However, they are not mass-produced, in which case projections indicate they would cost about 50 $/kW or lower.
Now, trust me on this one (or do the calculations yourself): of the world's 10 most sold cars, almost all have one kW in the engine for every kWh of fuel in the tank (netting for engine efficiency). So mass-produced hydrogen cars can have a powertrain that is an order of magnitude cheaper than batteries by the kWh when mass-produced. Not only you can build a car that drives 500 km—you can afford it too!
But what about efficiency, I hear someone in the back shouting: it is true that batteries are about 90% efficient, and the electrolysis, compression and fuel cells train is about 40% efficient. However, consider this: a battery can operate for about 1500 cycles before end-of-life. Every kWh of capacity will store and release 1500 kWh, which in consumer prices (different by country, I know) is about 150 $. This means that the cost of batteries is much higher than the cost of the energy they will store through their entire lifetime. Efficiency in operation actually takes a back seat when investment costs are this high.
Finally, what about capacity? Li-ion batteries store 0.25 kWh/kg (that's why Teslas are so heavy). Hydrogen (including the pressurised tanks, that are 90% of the weight, and netting for 50% efficiency) provides 2 kWh/kg, again one order of magnitude higher.
To be clear: there is a marked for batteries and one for hydrogen. Smaller applications for short usage are better with batteries (think commuter cars). Larger applications, or applications that in general need a lot of energy compared to power (taxis, buses, trucks, even ships) are better served with hydrogen.
The problem with many European racists is that they blindly assume that all muslims believe the Quran. Just like for Christians and the Bible, most muslims do not read the Quran, even if they keep a finely decorated hardcover copy in the house. In the case of the Quran it's actually even less likely they are going to read it, since the Quran makes a point of being in Arabic, while the Bible is usually translated. Even if many non-Arabic speaking muslim countries include Arabic in their school curriculum, often ostensibly to allow reading the Quran, no one can reach a level of skill sufficient to do so in school (think of how many US citizen can read the Bible in French or Spanish after high school).
Of course you will find plenty of evil in the Quran, just like in the Bible. Of course Mohammed did evil things, so did Jesus (being rude to his mother—note that it is a violation of the fourth commandment, punishable by death in the Bible—, proclaiming war in Matthew 10:34-35, vandalising property and inciting a mob against the merchants in the temple, etc.), and of course all these parts are ignored, repressed and buried among Christians. But if they are read those quotes and told it's the Quran, they promptly believe it, because Islam is evil, right? (NB: of course Islam is evil. I am pointing out Christianity, Judaism, and for that sake Buddhism are not better.)
We all despise Saudi Arabia and Iran for their barbarous executions of homosexuals, but can you remember what England did to Alan Turing? That's England, a country noted for centuries for being one of the most liberals on the continent, not Italy or Poland, just two generations ago. And it was a war hero they were punishing.
Point being: the Quran is not more representative of muslims than the Bible is of christians. Some believe that nonsense (extremist nutjobs), some say they believe but don't really care, some believe they believe even if they don't know what is in the books (looks like you), and some dismiss the whole humbug. "Culture", as you intend it, is a mostly personal issue, and there is no way to determine that Mr. X from Syria is less liberal than Mr. Y from Oslo. Variations between single persons dwarf the average difference between population by orders of magnitude.
I worked for a few years at a Max Planck Institute (not the same one as Jobb), and I remember he sent occasionally racist rants to all email recipients in all institutes, in which he lamented that the foreigners were taking his job. The rants were so logically inconsistent they looked like a crossing of Time Cube and the Unabomber Manifesto.
More than racist, which he is, the guy is psychologically unstable; the archetypal mad scientist.
Re:The problem is that landfills are too cheap
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Recycling Is Dying
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The way it works here in Norway is that you pay an extra tax when you buy an eventually recyclable item. When you want to get rid of your old washing machine, you can deliver it to anyone selling washing machines ("you sell it, you take it"). Their logistic costs for handling the waste are paid by the taxes paid on new items.
For some items you actually can get the tax back, e.g. for plastic bottles and beer cans. You bring them to the supermarket, feed them to a robot and get a receipt (one dime for small bottles, three for larger ones) and redeem it at the cashier. It's smal enough that people don't mind the extra price, but high enough that you see bums scavenging trash for bottles.
That's the main principle you need to drive home—you make people pay when they want to buy things that they eventually will dispose of, when they have their wallet open, and make them pay nothing extra (or even pay them something) when they recycle it.
I am pretty sure that Amazon did not originate in Luxembourg, that they do not have any significant infrastructure in Luxembourg, and certainly most of the products they ship are not made in Luxembourg.
I would not have any problem if their actual warehouses were all in Luxembourg and all shipments departed from there; however, they most certainly do not. It's a good thing to pay taxes from a single country when selling to several, but one must pay taxes where the value is generated, not going around shopping for the lowest rates.
The single market was intended to be used for simplification, not for tax avoidance.
I'm fairly certain humanity would find plenty of reasons to wage war if religions were not around to blame it on.
Governments would, of course, but it would be much more difficult for them to convince soldiers to actually go fighting.
Example 1, Operation Iraqi Liberty: US government wants to gain control of resources in Iraq, but they tell their people it is really for ideals of freedom and to do God's bidding. Iraqi government wants to stay in power and keep oppressing their people, but tells their people they need to fight because God is the greatest.
Example 2, US Civil War. North wants to instate an economy of small farmers who can buy products of northern industry, but tells their people that it is because we're all brothers (which may very well be true, but I don't see the same people so eager to go to war when there is no money to be made); the South wanted to keep mooching off slave labor, but said that the Bible advocates slavery, so it's really a holy war.
In all cases, it is difficult to convince someone to risk taking a bullet if you cannot convince them that there is life after death, and that is eternal and so much better than this valley of tears. This creates a problem for the few countries that disavowed religion and were involved in wars, notably the Soviet Union, which had therefore to develop its own pseudo-religion of Rodina and, just to be on the safe side, extensive usage of barrier troops.
Never thought I would see the day when the head of the the Catholic church represents a beacon of scientific rationalism dragging the USA into the modern era.
Corrected that for you. Except for a few lunatics, no one seriously disputes AGW outside the US.
Crusades are easy, that would be a response to 100 years of Muslim rape, slaughter, and forced conversion in Spain.
Aside from the fact that Christians did exactly the same when they reconquered the Iberian peninsula, and aside from the fact that in that time Muslim societies were far more liberal than any Christian society (Jews usually fled to Muslim countries from Christian countries), would you mind explaining why no bloody crusade ever went west to Spain, but all East to Jerusalem?
The crusades were the product of a fanatical Christian society, with the motivation of paradise for the soldiers and spoils of war for the commanders. They sacked, plundered, raped anything between Europe and Jerusalem, and that includes Costantinople that at the time was Christian. Which was expected of any serious army at that time. The pretext for war was the "liberation" of Jerusalem, and the real drive was a combination of poverty, ignorance, greed and religion. So the crusades were pretty much the ISIS of the second millenium.
Do read up some history lest you spout more of such nonsense.
It would take a lot of progress to get electricity to be the most economic solution for heating.
This depends a lot on where you live, especially for gas. For house heating, a heat pump is quite efficient, especially if you have a water reservoir available. For cooking, gas looks very cost-efficient since you simply have to burn it under a pot to extract all its heat, but a lot of the heat gets lost as hot air that bypasses the pot. Induction heating uses electromagnetism to generate heat inside the pot's metal, so even though the cost per kWh is higher, you end up using less energy, so it may very well be competitive.
However, you are forgetting the one source I have in my house, district heating. Industries generate enormous amounts of waste heat that could be used for district heating, I remember one air cooler in a refinery that dissipated over 16 megawatts of heat. If you hook up factories, offices and homes with district heating, you can provide heat without any other external source.
(My own disclaimer: I am researcher in hydrogen & fuel cells)
Containing hydrogen is no longer much of a problem, though compressing it in the first place is still expensive. Still, you don't really need a distribution network: the trend is to use electrolysers and produce the hydrogen locally. With the increased share of non-programmable renewables like wind and solar, hydrogen stations can produce their hydrogen when there is an excess of available power.
It's not just the price of batteries, which may very well come down: it's their weight. There is only so much that can be done now to increase Li-ion energy density; Elon Musk was dreaming of using graphene for superbatteries, but that's a very long shot. Sure, hydrogen cannot compete in the short range with batteries, but it is much better in the long range. And yes, batteries are much heavier than the tanks containing hydrogen.
The energy density of Li-ion batteries is about 100 Wh/kg, hydrogen is 32500 Wh/kg. Even accounting for 50% conversion efficiency and a hydrogen tank 10 times as heavy as the hydrogen, you still get over 1600 Wh/kg, well over 15 times Li-ion! Then of course you need to add the fuel cell system, which is dimensioned by power (not by energy as the tank is), and its weight is why FC cars are better in the long range, where this weight is a smaller fraction of the total FC system weight.
Running fuel cells on hydrocarbons directly is not an option (slow chemistry), but they can be reformed on-the-fly to hydrogen; in fact you can do that with diesel. The only problem is, the system gets so much complicated it is soon not worth the bother when you have a highly dynamic load as is the case for a car.
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You have a funny definition of freedom yourself if you think that it means developing and collecting techniques to use your personal electronics as spies for the government. Whatever Assange's relation to the Kremlin may be: on this specific issue they are fighting for your and my freedom with much more impact than any soldier ever had in the past 70 years.
According to a 2011 interview with Forbes, Assange is some sort of libertarian. Now I tend more to what is called socialist in the US, and believe little in trickle-down economy and market shenanigans, but you are describing a fascist, which Assange has never given any reason to believe he is. On the other hand, the people who "believe in absolute rule" are also those who collect and use the hacking tricks used by the CIA. So what kind of fascist would ever disarm the brown shirts?
Norwegian with electric car here, proud owner of a Leaf since August. No problem experienced this winter, even the days when it was cold enough that if you tried to wash your car the hot water would freeze on impact and keep the dirt in place for a few days (yes I managed to do that).
The problem is not the batteries themselves (though there could be if you hit 40 degrees below zero), but that electric power is used for car heating, which in gas cars is taken from the combustion exhaust. This means that I lose some range in winter, but nothing dramatic; I have seen a drop from 175 to 150 km in estimated full range. I have not adjusted my usage pattern in any way, but older cars without heat pumps and smaller batteries (like the venerable old models of Think) had more problems.
In general, battery cars start much more easily than fuel cars in cold weather: a friend of mine has had a lot more trouble with starting her diesel this winter than me with my battery.
The effect of classic and neo-colonialism on Africa is unequivocally disastrous, on a scale that makes the Holocaust look like a walk in the park.
Apparently, it was rather Tuva and bust .
It is an incredible feature. It is incredible that anyone is still sending SMS in 2016. It does, however, reflect Microsoft's grasp of the latest trends in mobile technology.
Your point is that Hillary Clinton charges as much as others, so she's no different. The problem is that "others" are actually a bunch of crooks, such as her husband, Trump, assorted politicians who all can be accused of corruption just as she is.
No one in their right mind pays hundreds of thousands of dollars for a speech—any speech. I am a researcher and I have been invited to give lectures in universities abroad occasionally, and the rule is that at most they cover your travel costs. Nobel laureates may get command some extra treats, like conference fee exemption, presentation placement in plenary and a nice hotel, but not big payouts; besides, in that case the speaker actually has to prepare something, not just spout some truisms and rehash some old presentation.
If someone is being paid hundreds of thousands for a 5-minute speech, the speech is only a fig leaf to cover for the transfer of money; now if you are paying that money to Malala Yousafzai, it's obvious you really want to support her work for girls' education; if you pay that money to a politician that may help your company, that's corruption, be it for a specific service or as "environmental corruption", where it is normal to regularly pay politicians to be on their good side. It is obvious that even in the absence of either written or oral agreements, both parties realise that the speaker will be in debt to the organiser. That's corruption, be it Clinton I or II, Trump or whoever else.
I suggest you Americans to eject New York from the Union so you can get rid of both candidates and start over...
Yes, but you need to be a third-world county or an associated country; source here. Essentially, you can get funding if you are outside the EU if you are:
Developed countries like US, Canada, Russia and China are excluded, and that's the set in which the UK will land after Brexit. Their only option is to join as an Associated Country, but that is more expensive than staying in as an EU member. Otherwise, they can wait until their economy tanks bad enough to join the other list.
I am coordinator for two EU projects, each with 6 partners over 5 countries, and I know the system fairly well. And I have a proposal with one UK partner in processing, damnit.
Last year I saw a presentation by the head of Technology Development of Hydro, which has aluminium electrolysis as one of their core businesses. He proposed the same thing you do, using aluminium as an energy carrier: make aluminium (primary production though, not recycling) where you have power, then transport aluminium instead of setting up expensive DC subsea cables.
Since I work in renewables and hydrogen, I asked him if this could be done for wind power; it could not, because aluminium factories require an enormous amount of steady power. If power is interrupted, not only production stops, but the electrolysis cells solidify and cannot be restarted: this is a damage that requires hundreds of millions of dollars and months of lost production to fix. For example, this happened when the Qatalum, Qatar plant went offline.
So, intermittent renewables such as solar and wind are not a good match for aluminium, because it requires constant power. Hydro power is a better match.
No, no, no. You make a propaganda movie to influence how others see you. The Triumph of the Will is how the Nazis wanted German to see them, and indeed the word "socialist" was quite popular at that time in history, which is why they hijacked it in "National Socialist".
Of course, what they did had nothing of the "socialist" part. They were heavily funded by the wealthy industrialist class (Krupp is a name among a hundred others), they were against abortion and for high child-bearing rates, were fond of guns and trained children with toy guns from an early age, stressed competition and survival of the strongest, had good relations with high clergy, including the Vatican, to the point that they helped hiding many Nazi war criminals after WW2.
Then of course there is the issue of "scientific" racism and the idea of master race, persecuting political enemies (guess what, almost all in the left side of politics), invasion of the Soviet Union, persecution of Jews (an age-old right-wing conspiracy theory used to provide the masses with an easy scapegoat).
I get what you are doing, trying to pull off the Goebbelsian Big Lie by associating the Nazis to your political opponents, no matter how historically groundless and ridiculous the association is. Maybe you believe it yourself. I would suggest you read more about the Nazis, you might end up liking them a lot.
So, all that persecution of socialists and communists, all that Barbarossa business, all that money the Nazis got from Krupp and the German aristocrats and industrialists, and that little issue with racial purity—that was all a charade? The No True Scotsman brought to new heights...
I hope you are trolling, because the other diagnosis is that you are so retarded you could be a Trump voter.
German Mavare is one murder victim in a particularly violent country, was not a national leader and apparently the murder was due to robbery. Venezuela is besides the only country I know of where the leaders of an opposition that organised a coup was not arrested en masse (as would be normal in any democracy) and executed (as it would be the case in the US, where treason is punishable by death).
While one murder victim is one too many, in a dictatorship the scale is very different, the violence systematic and organised. You're lucky if you don't have the experience to understand this.
Proof you are wrong, sir: Hugo Chávez won all his elections fair and square, according not just to himself but to former US president Jimmy Carter, who was quoted saying "Venezuela probably has the most excellent voting system that I have ever known".
Chávez' opposition, instead, organised riots, a coup against him, and he was so magnanimous as not to have them sentenced to death (which is undoubtedly what would be done in case anything remotely similar were to occur in the US; it's called treason).
Just because you don't like his policies, his attitude or his inept successor does not make the man a dictator. And by the way there are still elections scheduled in Venezuela, and it is likely Maduro is going to lose.
If I understand you correctly, you are claiming that the "real danger" comes from the "socialist" left wing of politics. You curiously attached the adjective "historically", even though, in the history of democracy, not one single time has any established democracy ever been replaced by a repressive Soviet-style stalinist regime. Not. Once. Ever. The closest you get is when the USSR invaded the baltic states early in WW2, but that's more like a country-to-country invasion that would have happened no matter what the regime in Russia was.
As observed by Eric Hobsbawn in The Age of Extremes, real dangers to any established democracy have always, without exception come from the right wing of politics: fascism in Italy, nazism in Germany, Franco in Spain, Austro-fascism, Vichy France, various dictatorships in South America, the colonels' regime in Greece, Salazar in Portugal, the Shah in Persia, Suharto in Indonesia.
And the way dictatorships start is not by censoring news in a private media outlet, however despicable the practice may be; it is by instilling fear in the populace, identifying an enemy (real or imagined), and convincing the masses that they have to give up their rights and trust a heroic leader to gain security and maintain prosperity. Sounds like anyone you know?
The charge times are a factor, but mostly it's cost, cost, cost!
Batteries are economically unsustainable: Li-ion batteries (the type with high energy density that you need in any battery vehicle) cost about 500 $/kWh. You can expect it to drop somewhat through the next decades, say to 300 in 2050, but they are already being mass-produced and unless a significant, revolutionary breakthrough happens, this technology has already delivered what it can.
Hydrogen storage, instead, costs about 12 $/kWh, much cheaper (I'm talking of the only commercial technology, compressed hydrogen at 350 or 700 bar). In addition to that, you need the fuel cells to convert hydrogen to power, and they cost about 300 $/kW (not kWh, kW). However, they are not mass-produced, in which case projections indicate they would cost about 50 $/kW or lower.
Now, trust me on this one (or do the calculations yourself): of the world's 10 most sold cars, almost all have one kW in the engine for every kWh of fuel in the tank (netting for engine efficiency). So mass-produced hydrogen cars can have a powertrain that is an order of magnitude cheaper than batteries by the kWh when mass-produced. Not only you can build a car that drives 500 km—you can afford it too!
But what about efficiency, I hear someone in the back shouting: it is true that batteries are about 90% efficient, and the electrolysis, compression and fuel cells train is about 40% efficient. However, consider this: a battery can operate for about 1500 cycles before end-of-life. Every kWh of capacity will store and release 1500 kWh, which in consumer prices (different by country, I know) is about 150 $. This means that the cost of batteries is much higher than the cost of the energy they will store through their entire lifetime. Efficiency in operation actually takes a back seat when investment costs are this high.
Finally, what about capacity? Li-ion batteries store 0.25 kWh/kg (that's why Teslas are so heavy). Hydrogen (including the pressurised tanks, that are 90% of the weight, and netting for 50% efficiency) provides 2 kWh/kg, again one order of magnitude higher.
To be clear: there is a marked for batteries and one for hydrogen. Smaller applications for short usage are better with batteries (think commuter cars). Larger applications, or applications that in general need a lot of energy compared to power (taxis, buses, trucks, even ships) are better served with hydrogen.
So you are saying that Christian culture is the worst:
The problem with many European racists is that they blindly assume that all muslims believe the Quran. Just like for Christians and the Bible, most muslims do not read the Quran, even if they keep a finely decorated hardcover copy in the house. In the case of the Quran it's actually even less likely they are going to read it, since the Quran makes a point of being in Arabic, while the Bible is usually translated. Even if many non-Arabic speaking muslim countries include Arabic in their school curriculum, often ostensibly to allow reading the Quran, no one can reach a level of skill sufficient to do so in school (think of how many US citizen can read the Bible in French or Spanish after high school).
Of course you will find plenty of evil in the Quran, just like in the Bible. Of course Mohammed did evil things, so did Jesus (being rude to his mother—note that it is a violation of the fourth commandment, punishable by death in the Bible—, proclaiming war in Matthew 10:34-35, vandalising property and inciting a mob against the merchants in the temple, etc.), and of course all these parts are ignored, repressed and buried among Christians. But if they are read those quotes and told it's the Quran, they promptly believe it, because Islam is evil, right? (NB: of course Islam is evil. I am pointing out Christianity, Judaism, and for that sake Buddhism are not better.)
We all despise Saudi Arabia and Iran for their barbarous executions of homosexuals, but can you remember what England did to Alan Turing? That's England, a country noted for centuries for being one of the most liberals on the continent, not Italy or Poland, just two generations ago. And it was a war hero they were punishing.
Point being: the Quran is not more representative of muslims than the Bible is of christians. Some believe that nonsense (extremist nutjobs), some say they believe but don't really care, some believe they believe even if they don't know what is in the books (looks like you), and some dismiss the whole humbug. "Culture", as you intend it, is a mostly personal issue, and there is no way to determine that Mr. X from Syria is less liberal than Mr. Y from Oslo. Variations between single persons dwarf the average difference between population by orders of magnitude.
I worked for a few years at a Max Planck Institute (not the same one as Jobb), and I remember he sent occasionally racist rants to all email recipients in all institutes, in which he lamented that the foreigners were taking his job. The rants were so logically inconsistent they looked like a crossing of Time Cube and the Unabomber Manifesto.
More than racist, which he is, the guy is psychologically unstable; the archetypal mad scientist.
You've got is backwards: frequent ejaculation reduces risk of prostate cancer.
The way it works here in Norway is that you pay an extra tax when you buy an eventually recyclable item. When you want to get rid of your old washing machine, you can deliver it to anyone selling washing machines ("you sell it, you take it"). Their logistic costs for handling the waste are paid by the taxes paid on new items.
For some items you actually can get the tax back, e.g. for plastic bottles and beer cans. You bring them to the supermarket, feed them to a robot and get a receipt (one dime for small bottles, three for larger ones) and redeem it at the cashier. It's smal enough that people don't mind the extra price, but high enough that you see bums scavenging trash for bottles.
That's the main principle you need to drive home—you make people pay when they want to buy things that they eventually will dispose of, when they have their wallet open, and make them pay nothing extra (or even pay them something) when they recycle it.
Have you thought for a second that, the moment you do this, everyone and their dog will set up a small company to manage their assets?
I am pretty sure that Amazon did not originate in Luxembourg, that they do not have any significant infrastructure in Luxembourg, and certainly most of the products they ship are not made in Luxembourg.
I would not have any problem if their actual warehouses were all in Luxembourg and all shipments departed from there; however, they most certainly do not. It's a good thing to pay taxes from a single country when selling to several, but one must pay taxes where the value is generated, not going around shopping for the lowest rates.
The single market was intended to be used for simplification, not for tax avoidance.
Governments would, of course, but it would be much more difficult for them to convince soldiers to actually go fighting.
Example 1, Operation Iraqi Liberty: US government wants to gain control of resources in Iraq, but they tell their people it is really for ideals of freedom and to do God's bidding. Iraqi government wants to stay in power and keep oppressing their people, but tells their people they need to fight because God is the greatest.
Example 2, US Civil War. North wants to instate an economy of small farmers who can buy products of northern industry, but tells their people that it is because we're all brothers (which may very well be true, but I don't see the same people so eager to go to war when there is no money to be made); the South wanted to keep mooching off slave labor, but said that the Bible advocates slavery, so it's really a holy war.
In all cases, it is difficult to convince someone to risk taking a bullet if you cannot convince them that there is life after death, and that is eternal and so much better than this valley of tears. This creates a problem for the few countries that disavowed religion and were involved in wars, notably the Soviet Union, which had therefore to develop its own pseudo-religion of Rodina and, just to be on the safe side, extensive usage of barrier troops.
Corrected that for you. Except for a few lunatics, no one seriously disputes AGW outside the US.
Aside from the fact that Christians did exactly the same when they reconquered the Iberian peninsula, and aside from the fact that in that time Muslim societies were far more liberal than any Christian society (Jews usually fled to Muslim countries from Christian countries), would you mind explaining why no bloody crusade ever went west to Spain, but all East to Jerusalem?
The crusades were the product of a fanatical Christian society, with the motivation of paradise for the soldiers and spoils of war for the commanders. They sacked, plundered, raped anything between Europe and Jerusalem, and that includes Costantinople that at the time was Christian. Which was expected of any serious army at that time. The pretext for war was the "liberation" of Jerusalem, and the real drive was a combination of poverty, ignorance, greed and religion. So the crusades were pretty much the ISIS of the second millenium.
Do read up some history lest you spout more of such nonsense.
This depends a lot on where you live, especially for gas. For house heating, a heat pump is quite efficient, especially if you have a water reservoir available. For cooking, gas looks very cost-efficient since you simply have to burn it under a pot to extract all its heat, but a lot of the heat gets lost as hot air that bypasses the pot. Induction heating uses electromagnetism to generate heat inside the pot's metal, so even though the cost per kWh is higher, you end up using less energy, so it may very well be competitive.
However, you are forgetting the one source I have in my house, district heating. Industries generate enormous amounts of waste heat that could be used for district heating, I remember one air cooler in a refinery that dissipated over 16 megawatts of heat. If you hook up factories, offices and homes with district heating, you can provide heat without any other external source.
(My own disclaimer: I am researcher in hydrogen & fuel cells)
Containing hydrogen is no longer much of a problem, though compressing it in the first place is still expensive. Still, you don't really need a distribution network: the trend is to use electrolysers and produce the hydrogen locally. With the increased share of non-programmable renewables like wind and solar, hydrogen stations can produce their hydrogen when there is an excess of available power.
It's not just the price of batteries, which may very well come down: it's their weight. There is only so much that can be done now to increase Li-ion energy density; Elon Musk was dreaming of using graphene for superbatteries, but that's a very long shot. Sure, hydrogen cannot compete in the short range with batteries, but it is much better in the long range. And yes, batteries are much heavier than the tanks containing hydrogen.
The energy density of Li-ion batteries is about 100 Wh/kg, hydrogen is 32500 Wh/kg. Even accounting for 50% conversion efficiency and a hydrogen tank 10 times as heavy as the hydrogen, you still get over 1600 Wh/kg, well over 15 times Li-ion! Then of course you need to add the fuel cell system, which is dimensioned by power (not by energy as the tank is), and its weight is why FC cars are better in the long range, where this weight is a smaller fraction of the total FC system weight.
Running fuel cells on hydrocarbons directly is not an option (slow chemistry), but they can be reformed on-the-fly to hydrogen; in fact you can do that with diesel. The only problem is, the system gets so much complicated it is soon not worth the bother when you have a highly dynamic load as is the case for a car.